Your time has come

I'm just about to sit down to do some work. It's been many a year since I brought work home for the weekend but we're two days from launch and needs must. I won't begrudge a chunk of my weekend for the satisfaction of getting this release out.

Prior to starting, I spent a few moments browsing some old bookmarks.

I found a stream of a new Black Mountain song on Pitchfork.

I urge you to click the link and listen to this song as loudly as humanly possible.

Off to work now.

Listening to Black Mountain's Tyrants

One two three four five SIX SIX SIX

I read yesterday that they're organising a massive Big Brother reunion party. Apparently there have been something like 112 contestants over the years and they're trying to get as many of the old house mites in as possible.

So I guess all we have to do is phone up a 'friendly' airforce and tell them there's some insurgents about 5 blocks away.

Kindness is a card game

I have a confession to make.

I'm quite partial, as they say, to the Pret a Manger Christmas sandwich. It's a pleasant enough run in to that orgiastic celebration of spending that commemorates the birth of a dude who wasn't really all that materialistic as I understand it. But then again, he probably never had a John Lewis nearby. Still, hey, that'll teach 'em for hijacking the all the good Pagan festivals. Oh and for those of you currently shaking your heads at my Revelations, I also like Adam Sandler movies, Poison, and live on a boat, so anyone wanting to question my judgement, I'm right up there behind you.

Anyway, sandwiches.

Turkey breast, pork and herb stuffing, fresh leaf spinach, crispy onions, cranberry sauce and mayo on malted wholegrain bread. It's not bad really. OK, so you pay a bit extra, retails at a lunchingly bodacious £3.25, 30 to 40p over the average, but I'm not terribly badly paid so I can afford one if the mood takes me. I'm not entirely sure which of those ingredients drives the price up; suppose it must cost a little extra to crisp those onions. I do love crispyonionmess time though.

But that's all ok because 10p from each one sold goes to homeless charities. And that's a good thing. And they also give all their unsold sandwiches to homeless shelters at the end of each day which is a damn sight better than chucking them.

Now, I'm also partial (as they say) to an Innocent smoothie. And I'm particularly happy that the old honey, lemon and ginger is back because it's ace. Now Innocent also like to give a little to charity at this time of year. And to prove it they knit these little bobble hats for the tops of their bottles which are about as much use as genital warts on your wedding night but they are cute. They also give 50p from each one sold to Age Concern. And the price of the drink stays the same.

So I wonder who's really doing the giving.

Listening to Bright Eyes: Cassadega

Lust

After one of the worst days at work in living memory last Thursday, I set out to catch up with some good good people and to listen me poddy on numerous trains as well as catching some top gigs.

Kicking off at the newly refurbished St Pancras gave me the chance to see the statue of the lovers embracing. They were meant to be kissing, but apparently the organisers / self-important arse grinders and annihilators of all that is good and holy (delete as you think applicable) thought it would be too risque. Since when did we live in a world where the thought of two lovers sharing a kiss as they meet or part is a problem? Doesn't stop their live counterparts on the platform so why aren't the Pancras politburo chasing them off with a damp towel? Should Rodin have lived in such unenlightened times.

Gary Larson (creator of The Far Side) once said he thought the reason some people found some of his cartoons offensive was that they were stuck in time, forever in that one moment, that there was never a resolution. And that's how we've damned these giant bronze frustratees. I like to think that in the early hours of the morning when everyone's gone they get to indulge in some lustful lip locking.

Dan lent me Zodiac Mindwarp's 'autobiography', which I started reading between Nottingham and Cambridge. It's clear to me that reading a book so vividly and clearly entitled Fucked By Rock won't make you attractive to members of the opposite sex. If it does then you should probably avoid them like an about to burst bubonic boil. I don't know whether this book makes me want to laugh, cry or puke my ring. This may indeed be the point. It makes Motley Crue's The Dirt read like a Ladybird preschooler.

It is a great title though.

Somewhere amongst the onanastic smacked by bitch up junk soaked white line feverish coprophiliac cardiac grinning tales of under-age sodomy and anal torture I found the following passage:

"The people of Western countries live their lives beneath frail illusion that are different yet fundementaly the same.
Culture, Language, and Religion are merely different shades of the same dream.
The one we call civilization.
And it is as fragile as a sparrow's bones.
True war, as Claus von Clausewitz, the military theorist tells us, is the only thing that shows us as we really are.
Beasts.
And this is why we need these illusions.
Illusions that have evolved over the years, with laws and enforcers of laws to sustain them.
Governments, armies, judges, police officers.
Not so long ago, Westerners believed that certain human beings were animals and bought and sold them to work in cotton fields and sugar plantations.
In a society like this, it is hard for people of a sensitive and intelligent nature to stay sane. Surrounded on all flanks by the contented and the delude, who sunbathe beneath satellites of cynical lies and twisted half truths concocted by the rich and powerful."

It goes on a bit longer but you get the gist.

So this morning the Doctor and I were returning from breakfast when some wanker in a flashy BMW took an illegal right turn off Kingston Bridge and almost ran us over. The Doctor, nearly correctly, called him a tosser. Car stops. 'Man' gets out and informs us that he has two ten year olds in the back and they don't need to hear words like tosser. I think the irony of him repeating the word tosser in front of two ten year olds who don't need to hear the word tosser may have been lost on him. As is his getting out and shouting at two grizzled veterans of the war on sanity.

Only buses and taxis can make that turn. A ha, he tells us, we don't realise his car is a licenced taxi. Yeah, right. Because an overpaid baboon like you would ever let a stranger in his mechanised cock replacement. I should have asked him if he'd take us back across the bridge or if the kids in the back were going to tip, but he was too busy pretending he had his documents in his wallet. That and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Lord Lucan and Madeleine McCann. Ape-boy's just using the taxi loophole so he doesn't have to pay the congestion charge. Should have got his number. This ladies and gentlemen is the future, the bastard offspring of Thatcher's demonic coiffure and her grinning toy-boy, Tony, and all his evil minions. There is a word for retards like this and it ain't tosser.

2 less letters.

Begins with a c.

I digress. It was great to get out of town, to get away from work, to sit up late drinking drinks and talking tunes. It felt like a holiday, a rest, a revitalisation, a charge for the old carbon batteries.

To Mr H, Ms C and their collective cats and co, thank you for your hospitality and for your company. And for not waking me up early.

And as they say somewhere east of here: thank you for the music.


Reading Mark Manning's Fucked By Rock
Listening to The Raveonettes' Lust Lust Lust

It was over in seconds

Something horrible happened to me this morning. My little poddy froze on me just as I was leaving for work. No time to stop to reset it as I was determined to be on time for once; on time for a train that was first delayed and then cancelled.

The trauma of losing poddy for the day meant that I had to face the hour and a half or so it takes me to get from play door to work door without being cushioned from the inanity of my commute by some pleasant tunes. I'll say now that I'm not a great commuting reader unless I'm on a long journey. I do pick up the Metro on the way in and the London Paper on the way out but only for the Sudokus and the rest of the paper I can pretty much finish within three station stops. Reading the free papers in the evening isn't really a great idea because they tend to suck the intelligence from you, especially the London Lite which is the literary equivalent of used toilet paper, although they proudly proclaim that the shit doesn't come off in your hands.

Commuting is one of those things many of us have to do. Dictionary.com defines the word commute as "to travel regularly over some distance, as from a suburb into a city and back". As far as I'm concerned the word commute simply means getting to work. If you have a job that's not at home then you commute, even if it's next door. You're just lucky you don't have far to go.

I don't mind commuting particularly. I get a train, a tube and then walk. It's some time to rest before work, more so if I can mostly cut the world out and listen to some Neil Young. Yeah, the trains are packed, yeah the tubes are packed, yeah the streets are filled with people. That's life in the big city folks, can't go anywhere these days for people. And you pay handsomly for the pleasure. I'm a pretty chilled out human being for the most part and I see no reason why commuting needs to be any more painful or tedious than the travel companies already make it.

And yet somehow, large groups of over-dressed simians manage to rile me pretty much most days, even with the anaesthetizing effects of poddy. So here are my top ten commuting tips to make life better for everyone around you.

1) Escalators are divided with an invisible line neatly down the middle, walkers on the left, standing folks on the right. DO NOT FUCKING STAND ON THE LEFT OF AN ESCALATOR. EVER. If you do, then don't look so surprised when someone tries to elbow past you. Or when one day they push you down the stairs into the wheelchair that'll be waiting for your paraplegic form. This extends to bags. If you have a giant bag, turn it sideways, stand behind it, in front of it; NOT BESIDE IT.

2) If you have managed to walk up or down that magical left hand side of the moving staircase of idiocy, when you get to the end. DONT FUCKING STOP. Really, keep walking right off the end and on to wherever you're going next. If you stop the person behind you stops. And the person behind them and them and them etc etc until everything grinds to a standstill and doesn't start again till after rush hour has finished.

3) After exiting any escalator, trainbustube door, station entrance / exit, remember that you still have somewhere to go unless you're collecting tickets. Stopping in this precise location will block the way for the people behind you. Step neatly to one side, fine a space with a little room to breath that's not in a noticeably public thoroughfare and then pull your map / mobile phone out. If you persist in obstructing the flow of progress one day you will be stamped on in a most righteous manner.

4) Whilst moving across any surface, look where you are going. That way you'll avoid bumping into people or getting run over by a bus even though you probably richly deserve it.

5) Keep your poddy or alternatively branded MP3 player to a level where if I'm sitting three seats behind you I can't actually hear the song lyrics. Especially if you're playing the kind of music that even a Capital Radio DJ would deem to be cheesy shite.

6) If you're travelling on public transport at certain times of day it's likely to be busy. It's like that every day, don't be surprised. Don't pull faces, don't make snide comments, no one cares, and no one wants to be reminded that animals on the way to a slaughter house are treated better.

7) If you're on a tube or train and it's busy, remember that the bits down the middle, between the rows of seats are often devoid of life and therefore make for additional room to stand and breathe. If you continue to cram into the gap opposite the doors and don't move down the carriage it gets really busy and it's pretty hard to get in or out easily. I promise you you won't miss your stop. I often stand in the corridor, often by myself and I've never missed a stop yet.

8) An extension of 7 is that if you do have enough brains to move down the corridor, don't stop after one step, keep those synapses flowing. Stopping so soon doesn't help. It blocks the rest of the way. And when you're there, try to minimize the amount of space you're taking up. Stand side on, everyone wants to get home and making room for one more will make someone else a little happier that they don't have to wait another ten minutes for the next every three minutes Northern line train.

9) The driver of your vehicle wants an easy a life as you and 99.99 recurring % of any delays or problems are unlikely to be their fault. Do not take your anger out on them, that's extremely pathetic and not a little cowardly. It'll also slow down yours and our journey. If you're really that pissed off with the way things are then write to your MP, the Queen, the Pope, God, Satan, Ken Livingstone, take to the streets, organise a mass stay-at-home or find out where the MD of the bus / train company lives and throw paint at their windows. Do something useful.

10) You are a complex piece or organic engineering, surrounded by many other complex pieces of organic engineering. Some of them may be broken, there's not much you can do about that, try and avoid at all possible costs. Chances are the rest just want to get to work and home again as comfortably as possible. Remember that. Do unto them as you would have done to you. Show a little respect. Smile gently. Be nice. Chill the fuck out. Be human. THINK.

Poddy's fixed now.


Watching (and crying from) Channel 4's The Not Dead

Get out here while you still can

They say you should never complain about anything you can do something about so all's good folks. Thanks for asking.

It's been a funny old week. I've gone from head in the sink, losing my beans, to being down the front at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, staring into the voluminous cleavage of some 18 year old National fan, wishing I was twenty years younger.

I'm consistently surprised by the inability of some of my colleagues to not piss all over the floor.

I love the new KFC bargain bucket ad where the mum cancels their restaurant appointment to feed her brood my favourite processed chicken dinner. It says to me: eat KFC because you're too fucking lazy to teach your kids some decent social interaction and you have no desire to put yourself through the hell you used to put your parents through when they took you to restaurants. Who says we're not getting smarter.

Listening to Neil Young: Chrome Dreams 2
Watching Black Christmas

Remember, remember, the 5th of November

Watching: V For Vendetta

It takes every day to be surviving in the city

Yesterday was one of those perfect, still autumn days: blue skies and hazy sun, crispy fresh, fire on with windows open, a final tender kiss of warmth as mother nature slips on her autumn colours. I took a few crafty pics in the changing room.

Then later that night a nice old man just down the river puts on a few fireworks for his grand-daughter.

Baby flack jackets on the merry-go-round

Patrick asked me to keep him up to date of all the movies I've been watching, as well as my blog posts, since his access to the latest Hollywood blockbusters and various points of call on the old interwebare going to be somewhat limited for a while. Of course, as yet, I haven't.

So here's a stone and a couple of feathered flying things:

Of the numerous flicks I've sat through recently there are 5 that have lodged themselves between the holes that is the colander of my memory: Letters From Iwo Jima, Cashback, United 93, Joe Strummer - The Future Is Unwritten and Mr Brooks.

For me, the pivotal scene in Letters is the moment when one of the Japanese commanders translates a letter, found on a dying American prisoner, to his men. The letter is from the soldier's mother: details of home, how much she misses him. It is no different from the letters from their own mothers, read by the Japanese soldiers abandoned by a war machine indifferent to their suffering. War is a horror created by monsters and fought by men, some of whom become monsters themselves, but most of whom just don't want to die, no matter what side they're on. Letters portrays each one individual, unique, battered down to a number, a figure, a statistic; it's a sad and beautiful meditation on that theme.

The Cashback flashback (I had to) where the au pair walks up the stairs has branded itself in my brain as giving us one of the most beautiful naked female bodies ever committed to celluloid. And I'd like to think I'm reasonably qualified to pass that judgement. Cashback is one of those rare beasts: a romantic comedy that's both genuinely, but not saccharine, romantic and funny. At times screamingly funny. It's a British movie that doesn't suck, it's quirky in a good way, intelligent, original, joyful, playful, sexy. It doesn't yet have a UK release date, which goes to prove, as far as I'm concerned, that most of the people who make decisions in the film industry, rather than movies, are imbeciles.

I wasn't sure about watching United 93. I wasn't sure if I wanted to put myself through that particular ride. one of the things I wasn't expecting was that the flight itself takes up only the last third of the film. The rest crosses between pre-flight routine and the air traffic control towers gradually realising they're losing planes and then one of them flies into the World Trade Center. With the outcome seared into the collective consciousness of the twenty first century, the film avoids subjectivity as much as possible, instead focusing on ordinary people reacting to one of the most fucked up situations you could ever imagine being in. You could call it a testament to the strength of the human spirit (on both sides) whilst the mechanisms designed to protect failed so dramatically around them. That the families of those who died provided the stories, and that some of those who stood in the control towers that day re-took their places is testament enough.

I wondered afterwards if those who took the planes that day were to know how many would die as a result of their actions, not in the towers but the eventual response, the ignition of a spark of hatred across the globe, the mass slaughter of innocents of all religions, would they still have done it.

What frightens me most is the fear that they would.

Of these five movies, all but Mr Brooks, I would say, have a strong human heart beating at their centre. That's something that comes pouring out of The Future Is Unwritten. That and the fact that Joe Strummer could also be a bit of a shit sometimes. Just like us all, heh? Perhaps all we are is the way others remember us, and Strummer, both good and bad, is remembered with warmth by those who tells his story around the camp fire. A simple story of a man who loved music, who believed in the human spirit, who failed as he succeeded, who stuck to his beliefs and who's band wrote themselves into the history books for almost all the right reasons.

Kevin Costner as the family man serial killer, Mr Brooks, with William Hurt as his evil conscience incarnate, dark and intelligent movie, blackly funny, a few nice stings in an original tale, Demi Moore so good, I thought she was Jennifer Connelly. So of course it seemed to disappear without trace in the British cinemas. Go figure.

Of the rest well:

Grandma's Boy from Adam Sandler's production company is a very funny movie about geeks and weed. That's all you need to know.

Disturbia is Rear Window for MySpace.

Vacancy was twenty great minutes stretched beyond endurance.

Fast Food Nation was all the ideas in the book somewhat unsuccessfully fictionalised. It is not an Avril Lavigne break-out movie.

Control was good but not as good as it's been made out to have been. If they ever make a movie about Sandy Denny then Samantha Morton is the shoe in for the lead.

Britannia Hospital is as accurate today as it was back then, maybe more so.

Knocked Up is weirdly funny and painfully truthful at times.

Ratatouille is sweet but not as funny as The Incredibles.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - The Beginning is basically a remake of the remake of the original and about as pointless an exercise in bland time-wasting mediocrity as ever there was. And that's with a finger on the fast-forward.

So there you have it.


I really quite like the two grey badger stripes that grow either side of my chin when I haven't shaved for a few days. I pretend I'm becoming distinguished...

Listening to Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros: Streetcore